Saturday, September 27, 2008

Can You Hear Me Now?

     As anyone who knows me or has read my book Are You Guys Brothers? knows, when Ray and I met back in 1976 I didn’t have a credit card. I was 28-years-old and I figured that if I didn’t have the cash, I shouldn’t buy it. Ray, though fiscally conservative, told me that to establish credit, I needed to have a credit card, so, by the end of the year, I had thirty.  If a sales clerk asked me if I wanted to open an account with their store, I said “Sure. Why not.” My wallet couldn’t hold them all.

     Seeing the enormous bulge in my back pocket, Ray pulled out the scissors and cut up every credit card except for the Visa and American Express. “That’s all you need,” he insisted. Suddenly, when I walked, I no longer tilted to the right!
     Today, my computer is bulging with Internet connections. In my desire to make contact with the world (“Can you hear me now?”) I say “yes” to every person who suggests a new means of making contact. Today I signed up for Linkedln. A couple of weeks ago, it was Plaxo. I’m also on Blog.com, YouTube, MySpace, and FaceBook. This is in addition to having my own web site and a contract with a wonderful group of gay gurus to manage it for me. I’ve told Ray that I want a computer that lets me film — what’s the word — oh, yes, “podcast.” 
     My goal in signing up for all of these options is to let gay people in Poland, Puerto Rico, and Pennsylvania know that they are not alone. I don’t really care about staying in touch with cousins or in making contact with former classmates. I want to make links with any gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender person, or those who love them, so that no one has to feel isolated and afraid. I also want to make sure that as many people as possible are aware of my products and services, all of which are gay-related.
     I don’t do chat rooms. One time, Ray used my computer to enter a gay male chat room (he was doing a research paper he said) and identified himself as Brian McNaught. So there on the screen was listedthe participants “Big Daddy,” “Hung Like a Horse,” “Cum and Get It,” and “Brian McNaught.” Nice. Very nice. Thankfully he exited as soon as he saw the other names.
     I have no problem in hearing from “Hung Like a Horse” as long as he (or she) is looking for help in affirming himself as a gay man or is looking for information that would help them enable others to affirm themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people.
     Ray doesn’t care about all of my Internet connections (because they’re free) so if you’re aware of any that I’ve missed that would help me make contact with my target audience, please let me know. 
      
     
     
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Saturday, September 20, 2008

Living Without Armor

     After spending four days in Austin with 2,200 gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and our allies, being inspired by the personal stories of people such as former gay ambassador Michael Guest, laughing uproariously with Carson Kressley and Kate Clinton, and having a late dinner with Judy Shepard, my friend Bob Witeck, and wonderful gay executives from Wal-Mart and Disney, I packed my bags and headed to Atlanta for a meeting of former Surgeon General David Satcher’s advisory council on matters of national sexual health. It was there that I experienced feelings of depression, due in some part to the loss of my financial security with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but more so, I think, by my need to put on armor in the presence of some heterosexual people with whom I don’t feel understood and therefore emotionally safe.

     I hate wearing armor. It’s heavy, cumbersome, and it exhausts me physically and spiritually. In the closing round of comments that we each made to the group on Tuesday morning, I shared with them my awareness of the difference between my feelings at the Out and Equal Conference in Texas and my time with them. “It would be like going from a gathering of all black people,” I said to the African Americans in the room,”right into a meeting where you were among a majority of whites. Your armor goes up.”
     In Austin, I lead and participated in discussions on how to help corporations become more culturally competent on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. In Atlanta, I listened to two forty-minute presentations on the government-funded “Abstinence Only” sexuality education that focuses solely on pregnancy prevention and freedom from HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections — education, that by the admission of the speakers — assumes that every student is straight. 
     “Are these programs gay-positive and inclusive?” I asked them each. 
     “No,” they said.
     “And they’re about HIV prevention?”
     “Yes.”
     “Are the gay students told they can leave because the class is irrelevant?”
     No answer.
     In Texas, I roamed among the dozens and dozens of elaborate booths set up by major corporations that underscored their commitment to valuing the diversity represented in the workforce and in the community by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. There was a spring to my step and a smile on my face as I encountered the many familiar beaming faces of people with whom I have worked over the years as an educator on gay and transgender issues. In Atlanta, I collapsed on my bed at night exhausted from the day of being on my guard against any attempt to undermine the goodness and normalcy of homosexualuty, bisexuality, and transgenderism. On the first day, I was the first to speak, objecting to the minutes of the previous meeting, in which it was recorded that “the use of the term ‘homo-realistic’ can be helpful in opening discussions,” and no adequate respresentation that the phrase was deemed very homophobic by me and several members of the panel. If I’m going to give 100% of myself to the proceedings, I said, I’d like my statements recorded accurately.
     In Provincetown, I live half the year as if I’m at the Out and Equal Conference. I wear no armor. I don’t need to. I feel completely safe. For the most part, the same is true in Ft. Lauderdale where I spend the remainder of the year. I stick with gay-friendly spaces. But most people, I acknowledge, don’t have that luxury. For most gay people, their lives are more like the meeting in Atlanta where there are many wonderful, supportive people around the table, but enough lack of true awareness and support on the part of some that one’s guard can never be let down.
     It’s like the comment of the gay executive who stood and asked his collegues to wait a minute at the end of my two-hour training recently. “I want you to hear from my perspective what it’s like to be gay here,” he said to the surprise of his peers and to his own, as he had not intended on coming out nor on speaking that day. My affirming session had prompted him to shed his protective gear. “Not so very long ago, I stood with many of you as our CEO stated very clearly his commitment to value the diversity represented by his gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees. His statement made me feel safe and proud of my company. Then a colleague leaned over to me and said unknowingly, ‘I wouldn’t want to work with a fag.’ So you see, it is both good and bad here.”
     I jumped up and gave him a big bear hug, feeling his armor come back up as I did so.  
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Saturday, September 6, 2008

Our Relay Marathon

     The Summer Olympics in Beijing were so spectacular in pageantry and thrilling in the competition for athletic perfection, that one could watch them and feel very small and insignificant as a result. I flirted with those feelings as I did while watching the recent Democratic convention where I was constantly reminded of the historic battles that have been waged by others in my behalf.

 

     And yet, as I sit in the airport waiting for my flight from Boston to Toronto, preparing for my presentations on gay and transgender issues to banking executives, and as I think about the anticipated 3,000 global participants at next week’s Out and Equal conference in Austin, I feel a little less small and a tiny bit less insignificant. All of us who are working hard to create a workplace that is safe and productive for all employees globally are collaborating in an effort just as spectacular as the opening and closing ceremonies in China and just as significant as Michael Phelps eight gold medals. To lobby for non-discrimination policies, domestic partner benefits, company-wide education, and empowered Employee Resource Groups is as much a contribution to the lives of others as marching in Selma against racial discrimination in the 1950s and 60s. We may not have faced powerful fire hoses, biting dogs, and bruising police batons, but the fear and loathing has been as intense and wider spread than just the southern United States.

 

     So, this is an invitation to feel good about what we have accomplished and have yet to do.

 

     The fight against racism is still being fought. I suspect that if Barack Obama is not elected President of the United States on November 4 it will be because too many white Americans couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black man, even one with a white mother and white grandparents.

 

     Likewise, as far as we’ve come in the past 40 years in our efforts to eliminate homophobia and heterosexism, we continue to experience, even in the most progressive cities of the world, “homo-tolerance.” That can and will change. We’ve made faster progress in a shorter period of time than any other civil rights struggle, but eliminating the ignorance and fear factors that propel homophobia and heterosexism will take a lot of hard, heroic work. And like all other significant achievements in human history, it is a success that will come from the team effort of a relay-marathon rather than as the result of a triathlon.

 

     My success with business executives is the result of all of the work that is being done every day of the year by brave men and women putting a face on the issue of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. I don’t educate in a vacuum. The members of my audience are aware of the neighbor’s son who came out in high school, the openly gay woman running for City Council, the positive gay character on their favorite television program, the gold metal dive made by the openly gay Australian, the battle being fought by the gay bishop in New Hampshire, and the use of the word “gay” by the black candidate for president of the United States.

 

     The 3,000 people who will gather in Austin for the Out and Equal Conference are there because someone went before them and came back to report on its impact on them personally and professionally, and because fifty years ago, a handful of brave lesbians and gay men dared to meet in private homes, with one person stationed at the window to look for police, to organize a small public demonstration with picket signs declaring the injustice of workplace discrimination.

     All of us have felt small and insignificant when we compare our successes to those whose faces appear on international television with national anthems playing in the background, or featured in a moving video tribute, but we do so needlessly. Some of them are there because of the work we have done.

 

    

 

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